One of the best parts of going to a book store is looking at the covers. A book cover needs to be simple, intelligent and needs to give the viewer an idea of what’s inside. Once the book is opened the typeface, spacing and use of imagery all need to contribute and add to the content. It can be quite a daunting task, but that’s what design is about. Jason Akejandro, in my opinion is on of the best book designers in the business. He currently works at Princeton University Press and works as a freelancer under the name Archetype.

Over the past month and half I’ve received some great submissions to the site. One these is Elaine Fong. I’m so glad she sent me a link to her work. Elaine is a graphic designer and art maker who absolutely loves color and isn’t afraid to play. A lot of her work is autobiographical, which is great. My favorite project on her beautifully designed site site is called Sleeping Colors and is an ongoing info-graph analyzing the colors she sees when she sleeps. Of course I’m a fan of her clean modern aesthetic as well. You can visit her site here.

I wish I could remember were I found this so I could give the site credit but I can’t. The RGB exhibition is just amazing. Aside from the concept, which is great, what really brings the work to an the amazing level is the scale. Who wouldn’t want to see giant amazing creatures drawn realistically like etchings swimming crawling and slithering around a giant wall. Oh yeah, you can buy the wallpaper too. Would you put this in your house? The site.

Spring time is almost here. I posted about Kim Rosen’s Surf board a few posts back and thought why not follow it up by dropping by, designer, Emil Kozak’s site. He has a lot of new work since my last visit. I especially like the blue cube pattern and the black and white bird shapes. Emil’s work is simple, smart and consistently great. It’s hard not to find something there you’ll love. Check out his portfolio here.

I recently came across the work of Kelli Anderson, an amazing experimenter/designer/photographer with an intelectual sense of humor that had me taking double taking as I poured through her work. Kelli studied art history, which makes perfect sense after viewing her portfolio. She is also interested in grids and the organization of information. One of her stand out pieces for me is the utopian version of the New York Times she created and passed out in the city with a group of collaborators. I’ve been putting together a lot of IKEA furniture for the baby’s room and was quickly drawn to the IKEA wind farm grid instructions. I also really like her handkerchief wedding invitation. Not only is it designed well but it’s just a great idea; plain and simple. The best part of Kelli’s work is that she spends time playing with ideas. In a busy world I often feel like that’s hard and am inspired to see someone doing it. Check out her site here which contains a great portfolio and a blog you’ll enjoy spending time in.

ORDINARY.co is the portfolio of Public School member Matthew Genitempo. I’ve been thinking a lot about 1 color printing and ORDINARY.co has some great examples. It just goes to show you don’t necessarily need color to make a great piece of artwork. Aside from the great design work I like the layout of Matthew’s site. I’m not usually a fan of side scrollers but the simplicity of the site makes it work.

Leif is an artist based in Melbourne. He’s done work for Modular Records, Sony Music, Warner Records and so on. He’s also exhibited work in Berlin, The Netherlands and Sydney. Lief manipulates, mirrors and collages images. Nothing new really; but he does it better than anyone else I’ve seen because of his sense of restraint and his just plain old super intelligence that you can see in each piece. See much much more on his site.

Some of you may have seen this on Facebook already. Meg has some new T’s in her Etsy Shop for men. One of the things I respect about my wife’s work, aside from being intelligent, simple and well designed, is that she does it all herself. She doesn’t send her designs away and have them printed, which would save time and money, she makes the silkscreens and prints them all by hand. That means she prints the tag inside too. She treats each product as if she were making artwork. The design on her new men’s shirts are based on the work of artist Sol LeWitt who did large, wall and building scale, texture and geometric based drawings and painting in the 1960s and 70s. You can and should see more in Meg’s shop.

P.S. Yes, it is me in the photos. I’m the cheapest model around and maybe the only one willing to be outside when it’s only 20 degrees for an hour with just a t-shirt.

Eulogy is the first magazine devoted to death. Sounds kinda morbid, but it’s really not. The magazine explores the lives of people, how they lived and how they died. I like the general layout of the website, and appreciate the brighter colors that thoughtfully counter a visitor’s initial reaction to reading the name of magazine. Sometimes sad, sometimes joyous, sometimes heroic, death is more than what we think it is. It is part of all of our lives. It effects both history and the future. It is something to be accepted, conquered, given to God. It tells the end of a story and the beginning of another. I’m glad to see a magazine that attempts to write about these things, I hope it can stick around.

My friend JF sent this to me, it’s a screen shot he took of the new MacBook Air email promo that he received last week. I build a lot of html email at my job, almost two per day, and even with a considerably smaller budget than Apple, I still manage to test every email in multiple browsers and email clients before sending them to make sure everyone sees the same thing. If Apple wants people with PCs to switch to Macs they can’t be sending emails that only work on Macs. What’s funny is a few hours later he received the same email at a different email address only this time the broken hand was fixed. Someone at Apple must have noticed something. Mistakes can happen, that’s why when you’re working on the web you gotta test your work. I’ learned a few lessons the hard way my self.

Now that I’ve said this I hope the Farm is working for everyone (except you ie 6 users that have to move on; you know who you are and you should be ashamed -shaaaaame) how embarrassing if it wasn’t.